Find Internet Service Providers in your area

Posted by
daniel

Dec
26

How to locate broadband Internet service providers in your area.

The FCC keeps a database of national broadband providers and it is publicly accessible at www.broadbandmap.gov. Just enter your full address or Zip code, and it will the broadband providers in your area as well as the advertised speed. One caveat is the data was last updated on June 2014, thus you might get latest information.

I checked the database for an area which had Google Fiber for the last 9 or 10 months, and it didn’t show Google Fiber as available in that area. The database has Google Fiber Inc. as a provider listed though.

Once nice thing about the National broadband Map is the open standards API they made available to the public. It is well documented and very easy to pull data from programmatically. The API also gives you access to Census data and demographic information.

Note – most of the queries require the FIPS state and/or county codes (Federal Information Processing Standard state code). For instance, for New York state, the FIPS code is 36. Any county within a state will have FIPS county code of state FIPS code + county FIPS code. Bronx county’s (FIPS 005) full code would be 36005, for instance.

Here is a simple python script on how to interact with the API, will use Bronx county and/or NY as an example.